You brewty
January 15th, 2008 - 11:18am - 1 Comment »
On Saturday, I made first use of one of my Christmas presents from Justine — a voucher to brew beer at Barleycorn Brewers. Trav, Stephan and Chris came along; since all of them drink beer in varying styles and amounts and none have brewed beer before it seemed only fitting.
The brewery is quite small but seems capable of handling the steady stream of customers who are all either brewing their beer, bottling their beer or just lounging around on the seats provided — there’s a big-screen TV, DVD player and cable TV along one wall, as well as signed sporting memorabilia. All that’s needed is a pool table and it would be a true “bloke’s club”.
Unable to decide between two or three choices, we were given a box of six different beers which will taken from our veritable bounty of 144 bottles upon bottling. One I was considering (a pilsener similar one I drank in Prague) was not available, so I moved onto my second choice which was a lager similar to Stella Artois (curiously called “Stella!”).
We first tasted the Stella! and all seemed to agree that it was rather a nice drop. Not too challenging to drink and it went down easy. Stephan said it reminded him a little of VB, which I also detected. I detest VB but the biggest comparison is that it was refreshing and easy to drink. It certainly didn’t taste like bile.
The second was an ale of some sort and though it was good, drinking over 100 bottles of it seemed a difficult task indeed. So, we opted for the Stella!.
Since the advantage of the brewery is that they do all the real hard work (buying expensive equipment, having plenty of different and interesting raw materials on hand, sterilising the equipment, storing the beer), all we had to do was add the ingredients to the large kettle of boiling water as directed, set a timer, then sit down and drink some more. I’m still interested in brewing at home, but this is a hell of a lot more convenient.
There are now three agonising weeks to wait until we go back and bottle all 144 138 bottles and taste the creation we made. Since this was the first time — and I was the guinea pig, with Justine forking over all the money — we stuck mostly to the recipe (only going over a little bit on a few ingredients). Assuming that the beer tastes like the one we tasted (or better) I can see at least some of the four of us going back to brew more.
